Tuesday, March 15, 2016

“Blake gets incredible range from his band here…beautiful
stuff for our ears…[not] any less great than Joshua Redman or Banford
Marsalis or even Sonny Rollins.”

– Will Layman, PopMatters, reviewing In the Grand Scheme of Things

Over the last 9 years, New York saxophonist Michael Blake has been
periodically returning to Vancouver, which he left in 1986, to create
and record new works with his pick of Vancouver improvisers. Amor de Cosmos (2007), a sextet somewhat inspired by his BC roots, featured Chris Gestrin, Dylan van der Schyff and André Lachance. In the Grand Scheme of Things
(2012) was by his Variety Hour quartet (Gestrin, van der Schyff and JP
Carter). This new release, his most ambitious in terms of writing and
arranging, adds cello and guitar plus guest instrumentalists and, on two
pieces, Michael’s own lyrics. It is also his most conceptual work since his debut as leader, Kingdom of Champa (1997), his jazz portrait of Vietnam. This time the connection is, more indirectly, with India. Originally titled The Komagata Maru Blues,
this suite of music was inspired by a tragic immigration incident in
Vancouver in 1914, when a Japanese freighter carrying several hundred
East Indian immigrants (almost all Sikh) was turned away using
exclusionist, racists laws. Michael has a family connection to this
history through his great grand uncle H.H. Stevens, a Conservative
Member of Parliament who declared at a public meeting, “I intend to
stand up absolutely on all occasions on this one great principle – of a
white country and a white British Columbia.”
Blake never knew Stevens, and grew up in a progressive environment.
But the connection catalyzed a creative process, one which was also
affected by the Syrian war: “I didn’t want the center of the work to be
about the failure of it all, rather I wanted to tell the story from
several different perspectives and show how far we’ve come. But then the
current refugee crisis came into play and that definitely sank into my
conscience while I was writing the music….The biggest departure for me
was writing lyrics. Most people have never heard of the KM and probably
never will. So I think the lyrics broaden the scope of the music into
what listeners can imagine for themselves. For me ‘The Ballad of Gurdit
Singh’ captures that moment in Vancouver harbor when the passengers are
not welcomed with open arms.” Read more...